23 March 2015 2:49 PM

I’m always intrigued by the rather spiteful mockery which follows any suggestion that decimal currency may not, in fact, be the ideal or only possible sort of currency. I’ve never been sure that a counting system based on the number of toes we all have is so fantastically superior, and so obviously more modern than the far more sophisticated system of shillings and pence which existed until I was 20 years old, during an era when the finances of this country were rather better run, at state and individual level, than they are now.

These jeers often include witless jibes about ‘ bringing back the groat’, which were also common during the equally stupid ‘progressive’ campaign to introduce the Euro. I have no idea what a groat was, and couldn’t care less, nor is it relevant to either discussion. There’s nothing specially modern or ‘progressive' about decimal systems. They’re simpler than the alternative, but so are the strip system of cultivation, architecture without arches, engines without gears, wattle and daub, septic tanks and cooking over an open fire. In fact, the earliest major country to decimalise its coinage was that heart of black reaction, superstition, autocracy and backwardness, Tsarist Russia, in 1704. The French revolutionaries associated the idea with 'progress’ but only because one of their main desires was to smash all bridges to the past.

They even tried to decimalise the calendar, but had to give this up when the universe, and suffering humanity which likes a rest more often than every ten days, refused to adapt themselves to their toe-counting ten-day weeks and ten-month years .Ten-week months were too ludicrous even for the Jacobins, as was the cubic metre, or stere, as a liquid measure. This was far too huge to be of any practical use. The current ‘litre’ is a cubic decimetre, like the centimetre a non-standard use of the metric system, employed to get over the fact that it is so cumbersome and inhuman. Even then, no decent French wine is sold by the litre, 200 years after its introduction in that country. Until recently, French wine bottles were sold by the wholly irregular measure of 72 centilitres, more or less exactly equivalent to that fine old English wine measure, the ‘bottle’. Now they’ve been rounded up to 75 centilitres. But they still haven't been forced to conform to a system that is based on ideals rather than on life.

The interesting thing (to me) is the inability of so many people to imagine any kind of world different to the one we now live in; and the equally great difficulty many people have in believing that any former system could be superior to what we now have, or that anything at all in the past was better than what we have in the present.

This attitude of shut-minded mockery is well summed up in the episode in ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ where Winston Smith, on an illicit walk through the poorer parts of IngSoc London, visits a proletarian pub, and witnesses this exchange: ‘‘I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ’ole bleeding boozer?’

‘And what in hell’s name IS a pint?’ said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.

‘‘Ark at ’im! Calls ’isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ’alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’

‘Never heard of ’em,’ said the barman shortly. ‘Litre and half litre — that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.’

‘I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ’a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.’

‘When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,’ said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.’

The author of this passage, George Orwell, famously noted that one of the first things that you noticed when you came home from the continent was that ‘the beer is bitterer and the coins are heavier’. He knew these things mattered not just for themselves, but because they represented something else that was different about this country, its ancient, polished-in-use institutions, laws, customs, made by and for its people, not imposed on them by neat-minded rulers.

When we hear people sneering about this subject, we observe two interesting and not very creditable forces at work. One, a shut mind that refuses to think; the other a prejudice against the past which prevents any lessons being learned from it. Groats, indeed.

I have long thought that the old British currency was destroyed for two reasons, both foreseen by Jim Callaghan (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) when he made the announcement that decimalisation would proceed, in the midst of a pre-election mini-budget on 1st March 1966. The first was that he anticipated the severe inflation which was about to burst on the British economy, and which would be to some extent disguised by a new currency whose smallest unit was almost two-and-a-half times the size of the existing smallest unit (in 1966 any typewriter keyboard would have had keys for fractions, which have now completely disappeared. I am not sure if early computer keyboards in fact contained them. An interesting unnoticed change). The second was that the establishment had made up their minds to join what was then the Common Market, where a single currency was already foreseen, and a decimal pound would be more easily merged with it. I believe, but cannot find the reference, that our Common Market 'partners' placed actual pressure on British governments to take this step.

The prejudicial establishment of a committee which was not even allowed to discuss the issue of whether decimalisation would be good or bad, came at a time when the establishment was all but pleading to be allowed into the supposedly glorious Common Market.

As far as I know ( I have not been able to obtain a copy) , the September 23 1963 Halsbury Committee which investigated the introduction of Decimal Currency into Britain (Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Decimal Currency) was specifically not asked to discuss the issue of *whether* Britain should have a decimal currency, only to look into ways by which it could be done.

As with metrication, there does not ever seem to have been any actual Bill before Parliament on the matter. It was just done. The committee was divided between those who thought the pound should be retained, for reasons of national prestige, and those who thought we should follow several Commonwealth countries, and base the new unit on ten shillings, as half a pound was in those days. There was also a problem about what we could call the new, smaller currency. ‘Dollar’ (though chosen by Australia and New Zealand) would be too obvious a surrender. But if we called it a ‘pound’ people would think it was a form of devaluation.

Certainly nobody did anything about it at the time. Gordon Greig, of the Daily Mail, reported ‘Sir Miles Thomas, the industrialist’ had asked ‘Would someone tell me what benefit Britain will achieve by this hysterical plunge towards continental standards? Surely we can use £100 million in ways better than confusing ourselves and our export customers by changing to a decimal system?’.

Nor did Callaghan seem to be in a hurry, when he announced the change on 1st March 1966. The implementation of the decision (which cost about £4 billion at today’s prices) was to be in five years, in 1971 (by which time Mr Callaghan would be in opposition) . In any case it was overshadowed by a new betting tax and the usual pre-election gimmicks of help for poorer mortgage-holders and attractive new ways of saving.

And so it just went, as things do in a world where everyone is either seduced by the new or unwilling to fight for the old.

The old system was better in practice because it was immensely more flexible. It was divisible by three into whole numbers and exact sums, which decimal systems are not. The different values represented by pounds, shillings and pence were appropriate to the things they were used to buy – pennies for sweets, milk or a newspaper, shillings for books or bacon, pounds for the bigger, more permanent things (something similar is true of inches, feet and miles, of ounces, pounds , stones, hundredweights and tons). Nobody who was brought up with it ever had any problem with it . You just had to learn your times tables in those authoritarian schools we used to have. I get short-changed (and, more worryingly, long-changed) much more often now than I did when we still had proper money.

Prices went up more slowly, and it was more noticeable when they did.

I *liked* the old coins for all those reasons. But I *loved* them because they were full of history – a pocketful of change would contain portraits of Queen Victoria, both as a young woman and an old veiled widow, some of them polished almost smooth, some miraculously unworn, Edward VII, George V, George VI, and our present Queen. The older silver coins, which really contained quite a lot of silver, shone when you rubbed them on your sleeve.

A couple of half crowns clicking together in your pocket, and you felt both rich and English.

They went not because there was anything wrong with them, but because the country they represented so well – an educated, self-disciplined and serious place - had vanished, along with the old-fashioned, solid wealth and hard work that stood behind them and made them feel so reassuringly heavy. What a strange thing it was in those days to go abroad and feel in your palm the featherweight, inflated, laughable coins of less happy lands, only fit for buying poor, thin beer. Now we have those here.

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Which UK party do the Scottish Nationalists most want to do well in the coming election? Might they prefer the Tories? And might the Tories, deep down, also prefer a Scottish exit from the UK to the continuing Union they claim to support? Is this the love that dare not speak its name?

Since their narrow failure to win the independence vote in September, the Nationalists have been in a very interesting position. I take the view that Gordon Brown’s intervention, in the last days of the campaign, swung the result for 'No'. But the implied promise, that by staying in the Union, Scotland would even so be given almost everything short of actual independence, has led to the moral destruction of that Union. There's no doubt a vote now would go for separation.

I do not know if London’s politicians could ever have made enough concessions, swiftly enough, to satisfy Scots that they were sincere about the Brown pledge. But I am sure that David Cameron’s attempt to use the pledge to outmanoeuvre the Labour Party disgusted and disillusioned many of those who until then had been prepared to give the Union a chance. Any hope that the Union could survive in the long term (as long as we remain under EU sovereignty, anyway) died at that point.

Loyalist Tories (blinded to all other facts by their ridiculous refusal to grasp that their party is finished and ought to be) still have only the vaguest idea of the hatred for the Tory Party which exists in the North of England. Likewise they can barely conceive of the even greater loathing of the Tory Party which flourishes in Scotland itself. It is visceral, and not open to discussion.

Whether Mr Cameron , whom I regard as a thorough cynic, shares this blindness, I do not know. Somehow, I fear I will never get the chance to let him unburden his inner heart to me. My request for an interview with him still moulders in a drawer somewhere, long ago yellowed by time.

But, were I a cynical Tory strategist, in possession of the private polling such people see (whose results are easy to guess at) , I would be doing all in my power to manoeuvre Scotland into leaving the UK. I would never say so, because the remaining believers in my party would be outraged at such a betrayal of the Unionist principle. But I would carefully calculate my actions to achieve this end, without ever actually making it so obvious that it couldn’t be denied. The feebleness of Mr Cameron’s arguments for the Union before the referendum, his bad tactics in dealing with Mr Salmond, his post-referendum manoeuvres, can all be explained by incompetence or lassitude, and might actually have been caused by these things.

There’s no shortage of bunglers in the Tory machine, and Mr Cameron is not actually an especially clever politician. Remember, this is the man who nearly split his party, quite needlessly, over grammar schools, who has twice reversed himself over Green policies, who did split it over same-sex marriage, who bungled the Juncker affair, who has twice reversed himself over green policies, who destroyed Libya, who embarrassed the Queen by claiming childishly to a foreign politician that she had been ‘purring’ over the referendum result, and who hired Andrew Coulson as a Downing Street aide against the strong advice of many.

Even so, it is wise to remember that political cynics, competent or incompetent, are distinguished by the fact that they do not have any principles. That is how they get on. Charles de Gaulle managed to fool French conservatives into thinking he would hang on to Algeria, while all along intending to pull out. He told them ‘I have understood you’ , and they thought he meant ‘I agree with you’, because that was what they wanted to think. Thus he came to power.

The Tory party’s best hope of a getting a Westminster majority again is to get rid of Scotland. A UK shorn of Scotland would produce a Tory majority Parliament and so at least temporarily halt the slow but accelerating death of the Tory Party. But time is short. The core Tory vote is (literally) dying in droves as it is composed almost entirely of older voters. It is not being replaced. And as the new mass migrants become UK citizens, they are unlikely to become Tory voters. The break must happen soon if the Tory party is to regain its lost ability to govern with an absolute majority, and all the fundraising and other advantages that come with that status.

The SNP are aware of this. They play heavily on the Scottish hatred of the Tory party, and one of their most effective arguments during the referendum was to say that, if Scotland voted for independence it would never have another Tory government. Continued Tory dominance South of the Border would work for them in the post-election period , when they will work furiously to reopen the question of independence while the votes are running so strongly their way. By contrast, a Labour-dominated government in London would weaken their cause – not least Labour currently has absolutely no reason to want a Scottish exit from the Union. It still hopes to regain at least some of the votes and seats it is currently losing to the SNP. It is also quite willing to have some sort of informal arrangement with the SNP to hold power at Westminster, a deal the Tories cannot do without looking as unprincipled as they actually are. There's another aspect of this. The chances of a Labour majority government are now virtually nil, thanks to the SNP surge, so undermining the Tory 'Vote UKIP, get Red Ed' bogeyman campaign. The Tory campaign needs to re-engineer its bogeyman.

This brings me to various stories in this morning’s newspapers, recounting interviews given by the SNP ex-leader Alex Salmond, over the influence his party might hold if Labour forms a government in May.

The Daily Telegraph said that words spoken by Alex Salmond, the SNP’s ex-leader led to ‘accusations that he would "hold Ed Miliband to ransom" ‘. I could not find, in the story beneath, who exactly had spoken these words, which also appeared in connection with the story in a number of other newspapers. But there was no doubt that the words actually spoken were not helpful to Labour, which is frantically trying to play down the Scottish threat, and to avoid committing itself to any kind of deal with the SNP. The impression was given that Labour is the SNP’s patsy and puppet. Is it that straightforward?

What if the Tories and the SNP both ended up helping each other to get what they wanted – a Tory majority government at Westminster, and Scotland gone from the UK? A phrase from my childhood - 'accidentally on purpose' - springs to mind.

22 March 2015 12:49 AM

This country is now in the grip of a permanent inquisition into the past. It can never really end, or find out the truth, because there is no objective test of it. Many of those being investigated are dead. The only effect of it is to discredit and undermine what is left of our institutions, from Parliament to the police.

Do people have any idea how much our civilisation depends on trust, or of what will happen when it is gone?

But it is even worse than that. As we boast of our supposed respect for Magna Carta and national liberty, we are trampling on them.

I suspect that many in politics and the media, like me, are worried by this. But they fear to say anything because they can feel the hot breath of the mob on their necks.

The moment you say that Geoffrey Dickens was a buffoon with a poor grasp of facts, that his ‘dossier’ on child abuse might not have amounted to very much, and was lost for that reason, some basement-dweller hunched in the sickly glow of his computer screen will start muttering ‘What’s he got to hide?’ and ‘Perhaps he was one of them’.

From such accusations there is no escape, especially in an age when bemedalled field marshals in their 90s can have their homes searched by officious gendarmes. The word ‘police’ can really no longer be applied to this bureaucratic, continental-style militia of paramilitary social workers, jangling with weapons, loaded with powers they aren’t fit to wield, and almost wholly bereft of common sense.

The quiet collapse of English liberty, and the shortage of people willing to defend it against the braying demands of ‘security’, has left us all powerless against the state. If Lord Bramall is not safe from this sort of treatment, nobody is.

I must stress here that I have no opinions at all on the guilt or innocence of anyone accused of such crimes. I am morally and legally bound to presume that they are innocent, unless and until their guilt is proved.

That presumption, far more than a near-useless vote or a ‘Human Rights’ Act, is the single most important defence we have against tyranny. Once it has gone, in practice, the state may at any time invade your home, seize your possessions, lock you up for ever and melt the key, simply because it does not like you. And it can invent reasons to do so, which a gullible media will unquestioningly accept.

Any judge of spirit, faced with the behaviour of police and prosecutors in modern Britain, really ought to throw out all such cases because it is impossible for those accused to have a fair trial.

Everyone will have seen on TV the processions of grim-jawed gendarmes in white forensic suits carting away computers, houses surrounded with cars and vans with flashing lights, the hovering helicopters, the self-righteous officers enjoying their fame as they trawl for ‘victims’ and promising such persons – as they have no right to do – that ‘You will be believed. We will support you’.

It is no part of a policeman’s job to believe either the accused or the accusers. Imagine how you would feel if the police told alleged burglars awaiting trial, and denying their guilt, that ‘you will be believed’. It is their job, and that of the courts, to assemble a case and seek to prove it before an impartial jury.

Over many years, those protections have been salami-sliced away. The innocent have never been at more risk of ruin. But at the same time, the police and the courts have almost completely failed to deter or control actual crime, much of which now goes unrecorded, unprosecuted and unpunished.

Our system is so upside-down and back-to-front that you can now be cautioned for rape, or be let out on bail after being convicted of crimes as grievous as manslaughter; yet in the late evening of your years, full of honour, having risked your life for your country and having done great service to the state, you can be publicly smeared by some jack-in-office.

The place where our demolished liberty once stood has been cleared of all traces, and rolled flat. In such conditions, we merely await the construction of the new totalitarian state in which our children will have to live.

Ready for action - on HMS Kwik Fit

Now that the Royal Navy’s bluejackets have been re-outfitted to look like garage mechanics, left, has the time come to rethink the whole thing? ‘Royal Navy’ sounds a bit archaic in the modern world. Perhaps we could rename it ‘Navignia’. And ships? They’re pretty old-fashioned too, aren’t they? Do we really need ships? If we can have aircraft carriers with no planes, surely a navy without ships makes sense as well. Kwik Fit could run it.

If the Budget was so good, why am I crying?

Reading the conventional coverage of the Budget on my London train on Thursday, I noticed I was crying actual tears of boredom, which poured involuntarily from my eyes and splashed audibly on to the newspaper.

How could people praise or take seriously this vote-grubbing twaddle of tax cuts, which will be snatched away before they fully take effect, and promises of spending cuts that cannot possibly be fulfilled? How can they do anything but laugh at the cheap bribes on offer, or the blatant political manoeuvres?

I’ll tell you what the Budget really means for most of us – a continued rush towards a low-wage, low-productivity economy of insecure, part-time jobs made tolerable only by cheap credit. And a crucial part of that will be the continued mass immigration that the Government pretends to oppose but, in fact, hopes for, as it keeps pay low.

And this, of course, will continue to worsen our appalling housing, health and transport crises. Our country was not designed for the population it now has, and these problems cannot be solved. We will simply have to accept that everything will, from now on, be worse for all except the super-rich. The biggest casualties of this are those, such as the old skilled working class and the professional middle class, who used to hope for a good life and modest comforts in return for long training and study.

Soon, there’ll be nothing much between the bloated banker’s bonus at one end and the zero-hours contract at the other. We’re becoming the world’s first third-world economy in a cold climate.

After all that fuss about schoolgirls rushing off to be jihadi brides, we are now to have exit checks, like any bog-standard despotism. And do you know what? It will be innocent grannies on their way to Spain who will be held up. Jihadi brides will still somehow slip through. Wait and see.

The redesigned pound coin is obviously small change. How about a New Pound, worth ten of the old ones, and divided for convenience into 20 shillings and 240 pennies?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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20 March 2015 10:53 AM

First, I am delighted to report a more-or-less satisfactory outcome to the baseless claim, made by a Mr John McDeere, that I had in the past described Mr Anthony Blair as my ‘political hero’

Mr McDeere has now posted as follows (oddly on the ‘Clarkson Controversy’ thread, rather than the one dealing with Mr Blair and mentioning his original post):

‘ Having corresponded with Mr Hitchens (and further researched his [PH’s] opinions on him [Mr Blair]) I can now retract my claim that he ever believed that Mr Blair was his "political hero". The remark was intimated to me by someone who is usually credible-in this case I trusted the remark too quickly, without assessing first.’

The retraction lacks any apology or regret, but I think I would get very bored trying to extract such things from Mr McDeere, who began thus, clearly intending to suggest severe inconsistency on my part:

‘Bizarre that Hitchens critiques Blair so much these days when he used to be an ardent fan. Years ago he stated that he was his political hero.’

When challenged, he showed no doubt or hesitation, but responded confidently

‘You must recall it. It was before the 1997 general election.’

Challenged again to provide any evidence of this, he responded, still without any hint of doubt:

‘It was said in person to a colleague of mine, so I can't provide any textual reference.’

Pressed once more to be specific, he then wrote : ‘As I recall, the colleague was John Rentoul. I can't remember the exact location in London, but it was a few months after he started working for the Independent…. It was more grudging respect rather than you outright supporting him.’

At last, a hint of doubt does not so much creep as burst in. From having said Mr Blair was my ‘political hero’ , I had merely expressed ‘grudging respect’, an almost total change of tune verging on a reversal, but made so grudgingly and so low down in the message that it lacked the impact necessary to wipe out the original impression.

The failure to show any real contrition was underlined by his next posting , which ran ‘Confused by the extent to which you are denying this-not really a big deal, as many were fooled by Blair's political campaign.’

But plainly it*is* a very big deal. Can he possibly not have realised this when he posted his original claim? One of my main claims to percipience is that I did not join in the media mass adulation of Mr Blair. If it turns out that in fact I did do so, then my reputation is doubly damaged, as I would then have been shown to have been a) a sucker and b) a liar.

Was Mr Rentoul a ‘colleague of his’? Suffice it to say that, in my correspondence with Mr McDeere, there seemed to be some doubt about this.

I may conceivably have met Mr Rentoul in 1997, though I didn’t then know who he was, if so, but I certainly didn’t use the words attributed in any such conversation. In recent years, I have come to know Mr Rentoul, since our newspapers have offices in the same building and we occasionally tease each other in the canteen or on the escalators. I think if I’d expressed hero-worship of Mr Blair to Mr Rentoul in 1997, he would not now let me forget it.

But the really odd thing was that Mr McDeere than returned with a reaffirmation of his original claim, writing : ‘I have it on good authority that those were the words expressed at that location.’

Now we know that he didn’t. Why is it that people seem to feel free, on the Internet, to say almost anything?

I have had some technical difficulty, no doubt my own fault, in posting a response on the site.

This is what I sought to post there. I think it also answers some of my petrolhead critics here. :

I am perfectly well aware of the fact that motor vehicle users pay taxes which help to finance our nationalised, subsidised road network . Alas, many of them think that non-motorists do not do so, when in fact they do through income tax, VAT, council tax and the many other duties and imposts with which non-car-owners are burdened, just as much as car owners are. This belief is actively dangerous, as it sometimes leads to inconsiderate treatment of cyclists and pedestrians by drivers who have been persuaded that such people 'don't pay road tax' and so don't have as much freedom to use the roads as they do.

I am also well aware that a country which bases its transport system, and its town and country planning on roads and cars, as we have done now for nearly 60 years, makes it very hard to avoid car ownership. I quite understand that some people are more or less compelled to use cars and have never criticised anyone for doing so because they have to. I occasionally drive myself, though I prefer not to. Truly safe and considerate driving requires a level of responsibility and self-restraint which most people (I I speak as a cyclist and pedestrian who sees a lot of other people's driving at close quarters) can't achieve.

I do not, as it happens, live in London. I work in London but I live in Oxford, a city where it is quite possible to get about almost entirely on foot or by bicycle unless you have a heavy load to carry. I can also travel between the two cities by bicycle and train, or by bus.

What I notice is that, even so, many young and fit people use motor transport to make short journeys within Oxford that they could easily accomplish without cars. And that streets within easy reach of the centre are crammed with cars parked so densely that they are now officially allowed to park in many places with two wheels upon the pavement. Traffic in Oxford, since I first lived there in 1963, has grown immensely. Yet the city's actual population has not grown that much, thanks to a strongly-enforced green belt. One of the main reasons for the traffic is commuting from several nearby towns, which have grown greatly partly because they have become commuter dormitories for Oxford. . In 1960, all these towns still had railway links with Oxford (Abingdon, Thame, Witney, Wallingford). Now none of them does.

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John Edwards asked, in tones full of scepticism, if I could ‘actually name any New Labour funerals or memorial events where the Internationale was played?’ He added that Caroline Benn was ‘obviously not New Labour’.

How about these;

From The Guardian , 13th August 2005:

‘Mr Cook’s coffin was carried out of the cathedral to the sounds of the Internationale and the Scottish socialist song Freedom Come All Ye.’

From ‘The Times’ 19th October 2000

In a report of Donald Dewar’s funeral:

‘…the congregation hummed along to a Burns tune, and then, remarkably, joined in as the fiddler, Aly Bain, and the accordionist, Phil Cunningham, played the communist anthem, the Internationale'

I should point out here that most Blairites remain in good health, and long may they remain so. I cannot speculate on what might or might not be sung at their funerals when, in the fullness of time, they take place. (I hope that enough people attend my funeral to sing*all* the verses of *'Immortal, Invisible, God only wise', and *all* the verses of 'Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation' , and that someone is around to make sure that the 1662 burial service is followed, corruption, worms, pains of death and all, and that there is no blasted fake grass draped over the edge of the grave, thank you very much. If, after that, anyone wants to sing or hum the Internationale, they're quite welcome, but only for laughs).

As for the Caroline Benn point, she was of course not a New Labour person. But I was recording the pleasure expressed by Fiona Millar, who was at the very kernel of New Labour, at having the chance to sing this song at Mrs Benn’s memorial service, where my one-time International Socialist comrade Paul Foot urged those present to join in with gusto.

Mr and Mrs Benn may both have been far from ‘New Labour’, but the gulf between them and New Labour may not have been as wide or as deep as some people like to think.

For instance, Mrs Benn’s principal preoccupation in life was the cause of comprehensive schools, which New Labour, in 1998, endorsed by using the law to ban the foundation of any future non-comprehensive schools.

And I doubt very much whether the Benns had much of a quarrel with Gordon Brown’s welfare policies, the real heart of New Labour, involving huge redistribution through such devices as tax credits, and a colossal increase in both public spending and borrowing.

Mr Benn’s differences with the Blair government arose out of his admirable English radical patriotism, which made him quite unable to accept the European Union’s theft of British sovereignty from Parliament, and which also made him a ferocious defender of liberty and an opponent of war.

His utopianism could be traced back to the pre-1914 Clarion era of British socialism, all bicycling, temperance, pacifism and Garden Cities, with a later admixture of half-understood Marxism which he picked up from his trade union friends. He wasn’t, and couldn’t have been, a Leninist because his liking for liberty was too strong and because, ultimately, he wasn’t that cynical.

The Utopianism of New Labour was a complete re-engineering of Leninism, by Leninists. It entirely lacks Benn’s nostalgic, romantic Edwardian character. This was the switch from the old model – a vanguard Party suddenly seizing the barracks, the post office, the telephone exchange and the railway station – to the Gramscian model (based on the ideas of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who realised early on the that Russian Bolsheviks were a disaster for the Left, and believed the Left had to triumph by capturing the minds of people in advanced western societies, brought up with liberal and Christian principles, who would be repelled by Soviet Communism).

Instead of the violent putsch, the bodies in the street and the cloud of dark smoke over the city, they sought a sunshiny non-sectarian movement, apparently dissolved in normal civil society, while working slowly but actively to gain control of the TV studio, the school, the newspaper, the museum, and so, eventually, of the minds of the peoples of advanced western societies. As this change came during after the 1960s, it was preoccupied with sexual and cultural politics, the family, marriage, race, immigration, educational egalitarianism, artistic experiment and drugs. Its interest in the older left-wing cause, especially trades unionism was limited and fading. It understood that state regulation was a far more effective way of controlling the economy than crude nationalisation.

This grew out of the organisational and political failure of European Communism, and over the failure of Western European Communist Parties to contain or absorb the posty-1968 New Left (which began with a French student demand for male access to female dormitories). The gap between old and new Communism was neatly encapsulated in 1968 by the May events in Paris, a romantic revolution which was really about sex, drugs and rock and roll, and our old friend, personal autonomy; and by the flattening of a tentative experiment in limited economic and personal liberty in Prague in August that year, final proof (if any were needed, and of course it *was* needed by the Communist faithful ) that Soviet Communism had ossified into an inflexible iron machine even more repressive and intolerant of dissent and variety than any pre-1914 territorial empire.

These currents came together in the late 1980s in the journal ‘Marxism Today’, formerly the stodgy theoretical organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but under its editor Martin Jacques a nursery for a new, post-Soviet left, and in the view of many, for the ideas which lay beneath and behind New Labour - deeply radical on social, moral, cultural, educational, sexual and international matters; identical to Margaret Thatcher on unchained economic liberalism. Political illiterates noted only the similarity to Thatchernomics, which they mistakenly thought were conservative, and so moronically concluded that New Labour was ‘right wing’ and Mr Blair ‘the best Tory prime minister we ever had’.

In this new and sparkling stream Marxism and student radicalism could unite into a movement capable, in the end, of accepting the economic changes of Thatcherism, while continuing to seek extremely radical social goals. Its problem was that, once the Cold War ended, it became completely linked with globalism, which the left loved because of its hostility to borders and the nation state, but also with the new ideology of ‘democratism’, in which the desire to plant ‘democracy’ all over the globe replaced Communism as the radical’s the utopian ideal.

Those who fully understood this (and there weren’t many on the Left or the Right, a grasp of Trotskyist or Leninist theology being essential to the task) grasped that the USA had now become the arsenal of progress, and believed that it could impose democratism with bombs and bayonets on those parts of the world that had until now resisted it. Iraq was a perfect chance for them to show what they could do. And, like all utopians, they concluded that the failure of the Iraqi experiment was caused not by the theory as a whole, but by particular conditions, by implementation, etc. So now they’ve done the same in Afghanistan and Libya and will carry on trying to do it in Syria and Russia.

Old-fashioned leftists were baffled by this. For years and years they had marched in the rain for what they called ‘peace’ .This normally meant the disarmament of NATO in face of the Soviet threat, but quite a lot of leftists, having their roots in various Christian pacifist traditions, genuinely believed that such a policy tended towards actual peace.

Now they found that their movement seemed to have been taken over by open enthusiasts for war. They were confused then, and they are confused still . The confusion has pretty much destroyed the Labour Party, and is the only way of explaining the rift which followed the Iraq war and which persists to this day. Those leftists who actually understand their own utopian, internationalist beliefs grasp why these wars are called for. Those who have embraced socialism as a substitute for a dead Christianity are outraged by leaders who preach a gospel of endless global war.

Perhaps in time they will manage to achieve what Hegel called the synthesis, and either become keen warmongers or give up being leftists. But the chances are that, like most people, they will refuse to think about subjects which might compel them to abandon cherished faith, and be angered by anyone who disturbs that faith with facts and logic.

***A small note about Mr John McDeere, who posted on Sunday that it was ‘Bizarre that Hitchens critiques Blair so much these days when he used to be an ardent fan. Years ago he stated that he was his political hero.’

When challenged as to where and when I had said this, Mr McDeere replied : ‘You must recall it. It was before the 1997 general election.’

I said I did not. He said : ‘It was said in person to a colleague of mine, so I can't provide any textual reference.’

I have challenged him both in the comment thread and through a personal e-mail , asking him to name the colleague involved and making it plain that I strongly dispute his account. The response has been total silence.

Now, I do have some confessions to make about Mr Blair. The first is that I sought and was granted an interview with him when he was still Shadow Home Secretary and (though the encounter was astonishingly uninteresting and unproductive of any fact save the name of his student rock ban ‘Ugly Rumours’, which had to be dragged out of him ) conclude that he was a threat to the Tories, which by that time was a cliché anyway. The second is that, thanks to being abroad for most of the Major era, I wrongly acquitted him of aping Bill Clinton in an interview on the US TV station C-Span. I did this because I was too anxious to boast to its viewers that I knew Mr Blair (I did in fact meet him some years before he became famous, and had a nodding acquaintance with him during his early years in Parliament, which partly coincided with my short spell in the Parliamentary Lobby. I never took advantage of this because I never found him especially interesting, or believed that a conversation with him would be illuminating or indiscreet).

But I really don’t think I ever called him my ‘political hero’ or could have been called an ardent fan’.

Indeed, I was exasperated by all the attempts, from Neil Kinnock onwards, to pretend that Labour had been rendered harmless. I used what opportunities I had to warn against Mr Blair before 1997, though I confess that I then had only the vaguest idea of what the New Labour project was and was mainly energised by Mr Blair’s Cameron-like wangling of his child into a wholly exceptional state school, the reason for our confrontation during an election press conference. I was right to see in this action a key to the dishonesty of the rest of the project, and to its fundamental egalitarianism, to be imposed on us but not on them. .

I recall a strange dinner in the top floor boardroom at the old Daily Express, at which the then editor brought in a very distinguished Tory commentator to tell us all we must get with the project and back New Labour ( I don’t name him because the fact still seems astonishing to me, like a dream or nightmare, and I have no shorthand note or recording of what he said. But he did do it – it fell to me to make an opposing speech without warning). This was quite common at the time, and I thought it wrong and shameful that so many people in the media did so, some of them Thatcherites acting on the basis that Mr Blair was Major’s enemy, and that was good enough for them.

Even if John Major was ghastly, and his defeat inevitable, it seemed necessary to me to fight against the Blair revolution, and to go down fighting. Those who give in to their foes without a struggle (as it proved) never rise again. They have to become their foes, adopt their foes' policies and aims to be allowed back into government, as duly happened. I must dig up my old cuttings book and check to see what sort of language I used.

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16 March 2015 3:57 PM

I hardly ever venture in to the Palace of Westminster any more. I spent many long days and nights there in the late 1980s, before I escaped from British politics into the more interesting world of the Cold War. When I do go back, I feel like a ghost. It’s not just that the politicians of that era are dead or gone, as are the political divisions and controversies. The wise old coppers who knew every face and name seem to have disappeared, replaced by the modern type, including (to my horror) armed officers with sub-machine guns, who really should not be allowed near any legislative chamber.

I can’t breeze in (as once I could), through three or four different entrances. Instead I must take my belt and watch off (I offered to take off my trousers too, but they said no) as if I were boarding an aircraft. I can’t hang around in the members’ lobby waiting to pick up stories (I’m not sure many members pass that way in the new age of the Internet). I doubt very much if I could find my way unchecked (as once I could) into the Ministerial corridor behind the Speaker’s chair, crammed as it then seemed to be with history and tension.

The old and myth-haunted Annie’s Bar (in all honesty a dingy and subterranean room, cheerlessly lit) where lobby reporters could mingle on equal terms with MPs unwise enough to go in there and risk their reputations, has vanished. I believe reporters no longer have automatic access to the riverside terrace in summer. The House of Lords rifle range, where I would sometimes go on long dull evenings, to make sure I could shoot straight if the Russians ever arrived in force (I could never get the breathing right, and might have hit the occasional tank, but probably no people) , has I think been suppressed by some politically correct frenzy.

Heaven knows what has happened to the gamey old House of Lords Staff Bar, so well-hidden that you could never guarantee to find it two times in a row, in the tangled maze of corridors over towards the Victoria Tower. It used to be the building’s nearest answer to an old-style working men’s club, the only bar in the building where you could get Draught Guinness in those days, and also the place where a colleague of mine once hunted down George Brown, when that maudlin old liability was once again in serious trouble and thought he was safe.

Late at night, waiting for a final vote, I found it an entrancing building, though I must confess that I was hugely disappointed by the whole business of reporting politics. It was, despite its faults, (mainly the excessive closeness between politicians and journalists) a good deal better than it is now. There was more variety of opinion. There were men and women of long experience who could not be suborned by the government or the party machines. What has happened since makes it look like , well, a golden age. But of course it wasn’t.

Anyway, I was back there today for the launch of an interesting new book, of articles about school selection, published by the think tank Civitas. I am one of those contributors, and my essay, along with the others can be read here as a pdf http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/theselectiondebate

free of charge:

My contribution is entitled ‘Why is selection by wealth better than selection by ability?’ and is on page 167, though the PDF thinks it is on page 187, in that way that PDFs have.

The launch, in Committee room 14 (which overlooks the Thames and is normally used by the Parliamentary Labour Party for its weekly meetings) was interestingly begun by two major political figures, David Davis ( a former grammar school boy who supports selection) and Tristram Hunt, a former public school boy who does not. Also present was Graham Brady, the Tory MP who stood up for grammar schools when David Cameron was dismissing the issue as an ‘albatross’ (something he has since denied saying, absurdly since it is clearly on the record. I have checked).

But , while the shadow Secretary of State for Education was present, in the boyish shape of Mr Hunt, there was no equivalent Tory establishment figure – only dissenters.

Amusingly, in the debate among contributors which followed, my old Westminster colleague Fiona Millar (mother of Alastair Campbell’s children and a keen apostle of the comprehensive ideal) gave warm praise to David Cameron and Michael Gove for sending their children to state schools, in this case the officially comprehensive Grey Coat Hospital single-sex Anglican school.

I don’t think a real educational conservative would relish the endorsement of Ms Millar, who is though herself a grammar school product, no supporter of such places. My favourite story about her appeared in 2001 in the Daily Telegraph’s gossip column : ‘Even Alastair Campbell's consort, Fiona Millar, finds remaining on-message a strain from time to time. I'm told that, as The Internationale faded out at Caroline Benn's memorial service, she was heard to sigh: “Great to hear language we aren't allowed to use any longer.”’

I should mention here that the Internationale (the first verse of which I can still sing badly in English and French) is the anthem of international revolutionary Marxism, and pops up at most New Labour funerals and memorial services, rather undermining the silly fancy that Blairism is really Toryism. believe me, it ain't.

15 March 2015 12:01 AM

Actually it does matter that the two main party leaders are forced to face each other in televised debates, each of them alone and cut off from the aides and scriptwriters who would otherwise whisper into their ears and make them look cleverer than they are.

Such events are the last faint trace of the raucous combative debate that politics used to be in this country.

It is incredible now to recall that, 51 years ago, the skeletal, hesitant aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home braved a furious 7,000-strong audience at the Birmingham Rag Market, a traditional ordeal for party leaders that he felt honour-bound to undergo.

His Labour rival, Harold Wilson, did likewise.

But can you remember when you last saw a major politician heckled? These days, audiences are screened to prevent it and offenders are dragged from the hall by heavies, as poor old Walter Wolfgang was when he dared to shout ‘nonsense’ – quite accurately – during a speech on the Iraq War by the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

And it is nearly incredible to note that, in quite recent Election campaigns, party leaders faced daily unscripted press conferences from an unvetted crowd of uncontrollable reporters.

These events had almost vanished at the last Election (I think David Cameron gave three in the entire campaign).

Entry to them required security vetting. Most of those who attended were members of the Parliamentary Lobby, that mafia of mutual flattery in which politicians and journalists eat so many lunches together that it becomes impossible to tell them apart.

Informal questioning is also discouraged. Back in 1992, Neil Kinnock (a gentleman when all’s said and done) had to rescue me from the clutches of his aides, who fell on me in large numbers after I tried to ask him an unwelcome question on his way out of the hall.

On the final evening of the last Election, I attended a tightly controlled meeting addressed by Mr Cameron, hoping to get in a question about his astonishingly lavish parliamentary expenses, still largely unknown to the public.

As he left, I slipped alongside him to pursue the matter but was shouldered brusquely aside by his muscular police bodyguard, who knew perfectly well that I was no physical threat to the Tory leader but took it on himself to guard him from unwanted queries.

And this is how a lot of it has happened. The excuse of ‘security’ has enabled our political leaders to hide within a series of concentric screens and walls, until they see almost nobody but flatterers and toadies.

There is no real chance to make them sweat in public (the worthless exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions do not count). These debates might just be such an opportunity.

I am sure that is why Mr Cameron has used every trick and dodge to avoid them. Far from breaching their impartiality, the broadcasting organisations are doing their most basic duty by trying to get him to agree to a proper adversarial clash.

Finally a snap that shows the real Dave

Modern political propaganda makes great use of faked-up pictures of unlovely combinations on the steps of Downing Street, or of men in other people’s pockets.

Well, here’s a genuine picture of a very unlovely combination at No 10 (sorry, Mrs Cameron, I don’t mean you, but if you will keep such company…) , which I had never seen before and which seems to me to tell an important truth.

Anthony Blair is by a long chalk the most universally despised politician in Britain, rightly in my view, and mainly because of the Iraq War.

Yet all the vituperation and spite of which the world is capable is aimed at Ed Miliband, who opposed the Iraq War, beat his Blairite brother for the Labour leadership and who is loathed by Mr Blair and his allies.

And the main beneficiary of this sliming of Mr Miliband is… David Cameron, who once called himself the ‘heir to Blair’, who speaks often to Mr Blair on the telephone and who has several times invited Mr Blair to Downing Street. My photograph shows an occasion in 2012 when ex-premiers gathered there to meet the Queen.

Mostly, these events are not photographed.

A ‘source’ told one journalist in 2013: ‘Cherie and Tony have been round there for drinks. Blair and Cameron get on and they like each other. He [the PM] doesn’t like Miliband or Brown, in a personal way. He is very admiring of Blair, whom he regards as a nice person and has conviction.’

I see in this picture the ghost of a rather horrible future – a grand coalition of Blairite Tory, Blairite Labour and Blairite Liberal-Democrat, none of whom can win the Election on their own, but who can together combine against all the normal people in the country.

Why Lefties love a Right-wing buffoon

Jeremy Clarkson is a Left-wing person’s idea of what a Right-wing person is like (I wish this was my own coinage, but I owe it to Andrew Platt, a contributor to my blog).

That is why the BBC have for so long been happy to give him large chunks of prime time, and why the publishing industry gives him so much space.

If Right-wingers are all foreigner-despising petrolheads who hate cyclists and think smoking is a demonstration of personal freedom, how easy they are to dismiss. Nigel Farage is a sort of political equivalent of Mr Clarkson.

The idea that Clarkson is the heroic victim of politically correct commissars is ludicrous. The petition for his reinstatement is grotesque in a world where there is so much real oppression.

If you are in the mood for signing a petition for someone who is really being persecuted, please visit change.org and sign the e-petition for the release of my friend Jason Rezaian, locked up without trial and almost incommunicado by Iran’s secret state since July last year. You can sign it here http://chn.ge/1LCNKfO

Mind the drunk trees

What is the reason for our hatred of trees? Local councils love nothing better than murdering lovely old trees in case they fall down all of a sudden.

I now see that the French government plans to massacre thousands of roadside trees because cars often collide with them.

I assume this is because the trees get drunk, rush out into the traffic and steer themselves into the cars.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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12 March 2015 11:33 AM

Am I supposed to rush to the aid of Jeremy Clarkson, cruelly suspended by the left-wing politically correct BBC after a row about steak and chips? After all, the BBC is left-wing, and it is politically correct to a fault, we are all (save vegetarians and vegans, of course) in favour of steak and chips, - and Mr Clarkson is….well, what is he, exactly?

For many people, he is the embodiment of what they think of as ‘right-wing’. He is full of machismo, he is noisily patriotic in a sort of ‘we won the war’ Dambusters way, he smokes, he is rude about foreigners and he goes on and on about cars and is (I believe ) responsible for the widespread, ineradicable belief that cyclists do not pay ‘road tax’ – a belief which encourages many drivers to treat cyclists as second-class citizens.

He was, I am told, invited to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. He is said to be a friend of David Cameron.

Well, I regard him and his opinions as a grave handicap to conservatism. I have never seen any logical reason why roads, a vast nationalised state monopoly paid for out of heavy taxation, should appeal to free market fanatics. Nor can I quite see why motor cars themselves should appeal to this sector of society. Mass-produced cars are barely profitable, the companies that make them often receive open or disguised state support. They spend most of their lives depreciating expensively at roadsides or in car parks, their costly and elaborate engines sitting idle for at least 22 hours out of every 24. It's hard to think of a better example of inefficient use of capital.

They also make us utterly dependent for our main fuel on some of the most unpleasant and fanatical regimes on the planet, who get rich and powerful thanks to our car obsession.

I suspect that these wasteful, ugly machines appeal to individualistic ‘libertarians’ because they enable them to express what they call their personalities, allowing them to be noisier, faster, more dangerous and more showy than they could be if they were not sitting in the midst of a ton of steel, glass and rubber, protected from the world by heavy locked doors, airbags, antilock-brakes, side-impact-protection and seat belts.

Actually cars and roads destroy settled societies, wreck landscapes, divide and distort cities, by subjecting non-drivers to the needs of cars and abolishing the walkable, human spaces which existed before. Once car ownership is general, it becomes obligatory.

Whatever this is, it is not conservative, any more than expressing contempt for other particular societies is conservative. If you respect your own culture, and expect to be left alone to enjoy it, then the least you can do is to show the same favour to other cultures. Patriotism doesn't consist of expressing contempt for other nations.

I know nothing about Mr Clarkson’s steak and chips incident, and I suppose we all have moments when we get angrily frustrated at the end of a long, hard day when a hoped-for pleasure is denied us. I don’t really care whether ‘Top Gear’ is transmitted or not.

But I really cannot see this as the liberal PC BBC versus the free spirit of the right, Jeremy Clarkson. If he is right wing, then I am not.